psych nurse, documentary filmmaker, photographer, crazed river warrior of the Indian River Lagoon.

Tag Archives: clinate change

Sea Level Rise in Miami and Politics. Let’s just say no to the “deniers.”

The last election was the first election I participated in a long time. I felt very disenfranchised and I realized how important it was to get people out to vote. I put together a list of clean water candidates because I thought it would bring us together and it did. It did in a way. In a way it didn’t. We really really need to do this all together.

Now we need this more than ever. Miami is floating away.

When Michael Grunwald was here he talked about the tides comes up to his house.

What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen is what has happened. People are going to stick their necks in the sand and its going to get worse and our fellow citizens are in danger. Please go talk to your party and tell them they need to start paying attention to the infrastructure. Even Libertarians believe in infrastructure. What is up with the denying this? What is the end game of that. Are we selling Miami at a good price? Will Miami be on sale if it gets destroyed? Why is no one helping? There has got to be money involved. Why else would all these people deny that the water is rising in Miami?

Texas Republicans have a new policy on climate change: There is no climate change.

While traditionally the state’s GOP has focused on abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring climate change, this year’s temporary policy platform is taking it one step further, calling for party members to explicitly dismiss it, too.

“While we all strive to be good stewards of the earth, ‘climate change’ is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice’ initiatives,” the platform writes.

So funny I just wrote the above and then I found this. This article is from 2010. Like most things American until we actually feel the pain we’re not interested.

“However! It does seem to me that the right’s climate denialism hasn’t been properly linked to the larger phenomenon of epistemic closure on the right. When Jim Manzi, everyone’s favorite sensible conservative, criticized fellow conservative Mark Levin for peddling intellectually shoddy skeptic arguments in his bestselling book Liberty and Tyranny, Levin went nuts, joined by a half-dozen other NRO writers. How could they not? The very same skeptic talking points in Levin’s book appear in thousands of blogs and comment sections across the interwebs. If they are intellectually bankrupt, a whole lot of people are going to look stupid.”

We are sick of talking points. You put them out. The news picks them up and repeats them over and over until you believe it.

This has got to stop.

“The right’s project over the last 30 years has been to dismantle the post-war liberal consensus by undermining trust in society’s leading institutions. Experts are made elites; their presumption of expertise becomes self-damning. They think they’re better than you. They talk down to you. They don’t respect people like us, real Americans.”

And you thought these people just wanted to keep your taxes lower. I don’t think so

“The decline in trust in institutions has generated fear and uncertainty; where there are fear and uncertainty, there are reactionaries to exploit them. Stress reinforces in-group bias — tribalism, nationalism, and xenophobia. Today’s conservative movement has created a self-contained, hermetically sealed epistemological reality, a closed loop of cable news, talk radio, and email forwards, meant to stoke in-group anxiety and reinforce group identity.

Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that the world’s scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world’s governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives.”

They don’t care about us. That’s for sure.

I was told recently that one of our State Rep Marylynn Magar said at a forum that with the ten bucks we’re saving on our cell phone tax a small family could treat themselves to a Pizza. Where Marylynn is this ten dollar pizza? What does each child get? Here’s a half a slice honey. Eat it and praise RIck Scott!

Or Gayle Harrell saying that people who are sick can go to free clinics and then those free clinic’s funding was taken away.

Sorry rant.

You get the picture. OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY.

So what do we do when the people running are OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY? Do we vote for these people even though they are in your party? Don’t we help our own friends that are out of touch with reality?

How about this? How about YOU take control and not let people run who are OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY.

So here’s REALITY so you can be IN TOUCH WITH REALITY.

Climate change is here and residing in Miami.

I’m going to post some articles and you can read them. Reading them will put you back in touch with the present and with reality.

Maybe you could send to the people who are running for things like President who live in Miami but have no clue the people will drowning soon and clue them in so they can be IN TOUCH WITH REALITY!

“Climate change is no longer viewed as a future threat round here,” says atmosphere expert Professor Ben Kirtman, of the University of Miami. “It is something that we are having to deal with today.”

Every year, with the coming of high spring and autumn tides, the sea surges up the Florida coast and hits the west side of Miami Beach, which lies on a long, thin island that runs north and south across the water from the city of Miami. The problem is particularly severe in autumn when winds often reach hurricane levels. Tidal surges are turned into walls of seawater that batter Miami Beach’s west coast and sweep into the resort’s storm drains, reversing the flow of water that normally comes down from the streets above. Instead seawater floods up into the gutters of Alton Road, the first main thoroughfare on the western side of Miami Beach, and pours into the street. Then the water surges across the rest of the island.

The effect is calamitous. Shops and houses are inundated; city life is paralyzed; cars are ruined by the corrosive seawater that immerses them. During one recent high spring tide, laundromat owner Eliseo Toussaint watched as slimy green saltwater bubbled up from the gutters. It rapidly filled the street and then blocked his front door. “This never used to happen,” Toussaint told the New York Times. “I’ve owned this place eight years and now it’s all the time.

Today, shop owners keep plastic bags and rubber bands handy to wrap around their feet when they have to get to their cars through rising waters, while householders have found that ground-floor spaces in garages are no longer safe to keep their cars. Only those on higher floors can hope to protect their cars from surging sea waters that corrode and rot the innards of their vehicles.”

Hence the construction work at Alton Road, where $400m is now being spent in an attempt to halt these devastating floods – by improving Miami Beach’s stricken system of drains and sewers. In total, around $1.5bn is to be invested in projects aimed at holding back the rising waters. Few scientists believe the works will have a long-term effect.”

This is from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

I mean really what do you know? Maybe you should call Rush Limbaugh on the phone.

Call the Rush Limbaugh Show Program Line

“The mean sea level has risen noticeably in the Miami and Miami Beach areas just in the past decade. Flooding events are getting more frequent, and some areas flood during particularly high tides now: no rain or storm surge necessary. Perhaps most alarming is that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating.

Diving Into Data

Certified measurements of sea level have been taken at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School on Virginia Key since 1996 (Virginia Key is a small island just south of Miami Beach and east of downtown Miami)[1]. Simple linear trends drawn through annual averages of all high tides, low tides, and the mean sea level are shown below, and all three lines are about 3.7″ higher in 2014 than they were in 1996.”

We have a senator in who lives in Miami who apparently can’t even find the time to go to leading academic oceanographic and atmospheric research institutions in the world?

Just say no.

This is the “World Resources Institute.”

Miami-Dade County, Florida has more people living less than 4 feet above sea level than any U.S. state, except Louisiana.

This fact sheet provides information specific to Miami-Dade County, Florida including the local impacts of—and near future vulnerabilities to—sea-level rise and extreme weather events.

Harold Wanless, a leading climatologist and geologist based at the University of Miami, returns to the “This Can’t Be Happening!” program after a year to revisit his claim that global warming and sea level rise are going to be much more dramatic than the consensus predictions of the UN Climate Committee, NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and other groups. With recent reports of faster melting on Greenland and in both the Eastern and Western Antarctic, Wanless tells host Dave Lindorff we are now facing a catastrophe that could see sea levels rising by more than 20 feet by the end of the century, and perhaps, if methane begins seriously erupting from the Arctic seafloor, even reduced oxygen levels that could threaten mammals, including humans.

Are you sick of me yet?

Here is some video. Excellent and well done and also talks about the Biscayne Aquifer and salt water intrusion. Richard Grosso also in this.

This is here. We cannot have anyone running for President who ignores this. Either address it or we will just say no.